If you're on Win32, one alternative is DBD::ADO. There are some different limitations versus ODBC, but overall it works well.

That said, I have to echo what others have also written. It's very unlikely that any slowness you're experiencing is from DBI or any of the DBD layers. The culprit is most often a data model that's unsuitable for what you're trying to do, or code that doesn't work well with a given model (doing row-by-row processing is often a problem, for instance).

It's hard to answer your question in general terms. You may want to post some code and/or design ideas, and ask for specifics.